Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Is God a Taoist? 330GOD: I meant the former although he latter also happens to be true.MORTAL: Oh come now, I know people who have openly claimed to have hated you.At times I have hated you.GOD: You mean you have hated your image of me. That is not the same as hating me asI really am.MORTAL: Are you trying to say that it is not wrong to hate a false conception of you,but that it is wrong to hate you as you really are?GOD: No, I am not saying that at all; I am saying something far more drastic! What I amsaying has absolutely nothing to do with right or wrong. What I am saying is that onewho knows me for what I really am would simply find it psychologically impossibleto hate me.MORTAL: Tell me, since we mortals seem to have such erroneous views about your realnature, why don’t you enlighten us? Why don’t you guide us the right way?GOD: What makes you think I’m not?MORTAL: I mean, why don’t you appear to our very senses and simly tell us that we arewrong?GOD: Are you really so naïve as to believe that I am the sort of being which can appearto your senses? It would be more correct to say that I am your senses,MORTAL: You are my senses?GOD: Not quite, I am more than that. But it comes closer to the truth than the idea that Iam perceivable by the senses. I am not an object like you. I am a subject, and asubject can perceive, but cannot be perceived. You can no more see me than you cansee your own thoughts. You can see an apple, but the event of your seeing an apple isitself not seeable. And I am far more like the seeing of an apple than the apple itself.MORTAL: If I can’t see you, how do I know you exist?GOD: Good question. How in fact do you know I exist?MORTAL: Well, I am talking to you am I not?GOD: How do you know you are talking to me? Suppose you told a psychiatrist,“Yesterday I talked to God.” What do you think he would say?MORTAL: That might depend on the psychiatrist. Since most of them are atheistic, Iguess most of them would tell me I had simply been talking to myself.